Postscript - The Wiki-woes of Rothwell and Inept Cold-Fusioneers

It would be hardly fair to end our disquisition on the global rise of the latrines without commenting on the fate of the Wikipedia entry for Cold Fusion, and the vagaries of that Serpent's Tooth that peri-ambulates under the name Jed Rothwell. On Dec. 15, three weeks after our first anti-Wikipedia was released, Rothwell flattered Wikipedia and himself for the CF entry with this wisecrack:

Maybe Wikipedia deserves more respect after all! This page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia

. . . has a link to an attack by Correa et al.:

http://www.aetherometry.com/antiwikipedia/

Sometimes you can judge people by their enemies.

It's amusing to see Rothwell admit how he makes his judgements. They are based on apriorisms like "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Let's see where that gets him.

In this context, it never hurts to emphasize those two basic facts of survival that affect every researcher who makes unsettling, pioneering discoveries: uno, the enemies of new knowledge, factual and actual, are nearly always pretentious, stupid and ignorant, and this can be easily demonstrated by the fact that they do not read, study or test 'the work of their enemies'. Proof: Wikipedians like William Connolley or Warts like Rothwell define their enemies by hunches and never by actually getting acquainted with 'the work of their enemies'. The public record of their relationship to Aetherometry constitutes a solid proof of this fact: they can't even read, let alone... Little wonder, then, that what such people write are always the off-target fabrications of a sick, barren and resentful mind. Duo, what the enemies of new knowledge fear is the loss of their actual or perceived social power, or social status, and their hunches are fueled by nothing but fear.

Of course, Rothwell's judgement has no substance other than gloating over the elevated status of the Wikipedia Cold Fusion entry. That entry was elected to be a 'featured article' (just like the Schizophrenia entry we discussed above...what an honor!) and it indeed fits in perfectly with Wikipedia's standards of effective disinformation. No? Let's see. First of all, it is amusing to be informed that Cold Fusion is regarded by an unspecified majority of scientists as a 'pathological science'. That must have scored a few points towards 'featurability'. But there are plenty of other subtle and not so subtle details. The entry makes constant reference to Rothwell's and Storms' canr-lenr site. This is the same one-sided site that fails to list our paper on the subject (a link to which, incidentally, someone added to the References section of the Wikipedia entry on CF, and either Rothwell or one of his cronies repeatedly removed), and that, not surprisingly, fails to list, with one exception, anything that Eugene Mallove wrote, from 2001 onward, on the subject of Cold Fusion and its relation to Aetherometry. However, the perfection of the fit between Rothwell and the Cold Fusioneers, on the one hand, and Wikipedia, on the other, can only be illustrated by an example that crystallizes the definitive pseudoscience nature of the Cold Fusion entry (underlining ours):

As of 2005 the excess heat, tritium and other phenomena remain unexplained, and skeptics claim the reported energy output has never been associated with an equivalent amount of fusion products of any kind. Cold fusion researchers disagree, pointing out that the heat is always associated with helium-4 production in the same ratio as plasma fusion (~24 MeV per helium atom). Skeptics say that although there may be a genuine physical phenomenon at work, the hypothesis that it involves nuclear fusion is unproven and widely seen as unlikely, whereas cold fusion researchers say that any effect which produces 24 MeV per helium atom, x-rays, tritium and so on is -- by definition -- a fusion reaction. After sixteen years of investigation, the skeptics and the cold fusion researchers remain as far apart in their views as they were in March 1989, but study continues and the researchers remain hopeful that the phenomenon will be understood eventually.

We mentioned the omission of our work on room-temperature fusion and the omission of Mallove's thoughts and writings in the last 4 years of his life for a reason: these omitted writings indicate how placing the problem on the basis of a mythical "24 MeV per helium atom" is a sure way to misunderstand what is taking place. This myth is where, misguidedly, a majority of Cold Fusioneers came to place their emphasis, and where the skeptics will continue to defeat them. The Wikipedia article locks them in - as did the DoE and the Review they themselves, or their mouthpieces, submitted to the DoE:

The review document submitted to the DoE (...) recognizes indirect evidence in support of the D + D -> 4He + 23.8 MeV (heat) reaction, although the measurement of 4He quantity is imprecise.

Yes, formulated in this manner, the whole Cold Fusion affair becomes bogus. As bogus as it is to include neutrons as necessary or possible byproducts of the reactions of interest. The Wikipedia entry on Cold Fusion is, in fact, a sham - a sham that resulted as much from the ill-will and ignorance of skeptics, as it did from the ignorance and ill-will of Cold Fusioneers. These are the same individuals who completely ignored the reaction we proposed, andour aetherometric solution to the problem of the entire field; the same ones who systematically fail to understand, or even mention, the role of protons in the reactions of interest - and ignored the work of others, including Harold Aspden's, on this subject; the same ones who, after all these years of research, have not come up with a single reproducible design, let alone a power generator that "will save humanity" as they like to claim; the same ones who disregarded all that Mallove wrote and said in the last years of his life, and whom he came to very publicly denounce; the same ones who mounted and to this day mount covert and not so covert campaigns against our work and power technologies, just as they suppressed and suppress any mention of our paper on Cold Fusion, where it was stated rather plainly that:

In a nutshell, the problem is that the reaction put forth -

D+D -> 4He + 23.8 MeV (heat)

is an ideal shortcut [2] that does not exist in nature. What resembles it, and exists in nature, is a reaction that releases gamma radiation via a paired intranuclear mass-reduction ("shrinkage") of two protons - an intranuclear process, which our work has identified, but about which existing physics still knows strictly nothing, other than its outcome:

D+D -> 4He + 23.5 MeV (gamma)

There is no magic that can convert the production of gamma radiation of 23.5 MeV (our best estimate) into heat having the same energetic value. This is the grand systematic error of the field, the 'horrible truth'.

Aetherometrically - and once we get rid of the mythical reaction which the five proposers, and other cold-fusioneers, are so fixated on - we must take into account all of the possible reactions, not only those of deuterium with itself, but also those of deuterium with tritium, with 3He, and of the latter with itself. The five proposers explicitly and implicitly set out not to do this. Our own work has identified a minimum three-step reaction process as being the one of interest, because this process alone avoids both gamma and neutron emission, and permits extraction of energy from the deceleration of nuclear emitted protons.

Could there be a more fitting place for deluded Cold Fusioneers and propagandists à la Rothwell than Wikipedia? For what is the defining quality of disinformation? Is it not to mischaracterize an issue such that all that belongs to its essence will appear superfluous or irrelevant, inessential? In the Cold Fusion entry, and with Rothwell's help, Wikipedia manages to cast the issue of Cold Fusion not as a scientific problem, but as a dispute between two uniformly religious positions - skeptics and believers. But that is, to begin with, a false characterization: even though Rothwell has done his best to give the appearance that all Cold Fusion researchers (Mallove included...) belong to his sect, the truth is that most who have aided and abetted Rothwell are ingrained with the same pseudoscientific prejudices which are expressed by their enemies, the skeptics. An entry on Cold Fusion that was balanced and objective would make reference to other approaches that do not share the cardinal mistakes of the CF dogma ("24 MeV per helium atom"), such as Aetherometry or the work of Harold Aspden, etc, just as it would make reference to experiments that have conclusively demonstrated the errors of many of these Rothwell-led fusioneers (such as Scott Little's negative reproduction of Mizuno's water-arc or water-glow discharge cells).

So, it's hardly surprising to see Rothwell state, with his usual pomp:

I agree with Wikipedia policy that it is not the right place for a detailed article on Aetherometry. If ever there was a subject that should be presented by supporters in their own webspace, Aetherometry is it.

He says this because he would love to suppress Aetherometry, and even the Correas if he could.

However, it's amusing to note that this fool agrees with us! For we asked Che Bimbo to delete the entry, and in his almightiness as ultimate arbitrator he refused. Moreover, the entry was originally created by Akronos' Editor-in-Chief in response to a request in Wikipedia itself. The rest is, as they say, history - the history of a confrontation with so many spiritual children of Rothwell, every bit as retarded.

But lately Rothwell's new-found friends at Wikipedia have decided that his love for them shall not be reciprocated. This is most likely part of a new campaign that's under way. The efforts of the science-purification cabal (Freddie Salsbury, Billy Connolley, Natalinasmpf and others) are currently, in the wake of Nature's endorsement of Wikipedia as an emergent authority on science, being extended and strengthened: there's an influx of new Administrators pledged to the "scientific point of view" (renewed attempts to elevate Connolley to Adminiship; a smashing victory for the spanking new Adminship of the bogus anarcho-girlie Natalina; etc), and a new sanitization of the enemies of mainstream or Official Science. And thus the Cold Fusion article, after its only-too-brief brief moment in the warm consensual sun, is presently in the process of being voted for demotion from "featured article" status, largely because of the contributions which Jed Rothwell and his troupe had recently been putting in (over 100 changes in the last 2 weeks of December, according to the Wikipedia police). Says one Wikipedian (User Taxman):

It appears we are already establishing consensus the recent changes are ruining the article.

Ironic, that the enemies of Rothwell's enemies are not his friends. In fact, one of the Wikipedian science-cabalists referred to Rothwell and his Cold-Fusioneer cohorts as "lunatics". The brief mid-marriage honeymoon was over, as Rothwell concluded that, after all, Wikipedia was not all that was advertised:

The article finally has some real science based on actual, credible, mainstream journals. Before it was nothing but unorganized "skeptical" POV hot air written by people who have not even read the literature. --JedRothwell 20:59, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

For our part, we would say, instead, that Rothwell has exactly the friends that he deserves, and his party of Cold Fusioneers has exactly the errors and the Rothwell they deserve. All is well, then.